Red Emma’s, Baltimore’s astoundingly awesome collectively run radical bookstore/cafe, is having an Indiegogo fundraiser that’s gone into its final stretch. Red Emma’s has great coffee, is a community hub, and stocks really fabulous books. When I did an event there a few years back, I had a spectacular time. The world’s a better place for having Red Emma’s in it, which is why I just put $100 into the fundraiser.
We’ve just signed a lease for the fall of 2013; located at 30 West North Avenue, next door to Liam Flynn’s Ale House (itself started by founding Red Emma’s collective members!), the new space will be over five times the size of our current location.
We’ll be expanding our food operation to a full kitchen, moving beyond our current limited cafe menu to really let some of the culinary talent we’ve got in the collective shine. And we’ll be doing this in a way that makes extensive use of locally sourced agricultural products while keeping prices affordable: healthy, sustainable food should be the norm, not a luxury.
We’ll be increasing the footprint of our bookstore sixfold—space constraints alone have prevented us from building the world class selection we’ve dreamed of, and the new space will make it possible to really build the kind of radical bookstore Baltimore deserves.
Our coffee is about to get a lot more exciting: we’re bringing on board new local roaster Thread Coffee as a partner on the new project; not only will we be roasting coffee in-house, but we’ll be using directly fair traded coffee from cooperatives in the global South.
The space is going to be far more welcoming; not only are we going to vastly expand the number of seats, we’ll also be full-accessible in the new space (a compromise we had to make with our current location that’s always been pretty troubling for us as a collective!)!
Plus! The Baltimore Free School is moving with us! The new Red Emma’s space will offer a meeting and classroom space coordinated by the BFS collective, allowing us to offer free, year-round educational programming, as well as a space for groups to meet (with optional catering by Red Emma’s) for reasonable rates.
(Thanks, Christa!)